October 2, 2012

 There was some new shelving to be put into the church building so Rick had to be at the church at 9am to let the workers in.  We also had correlation with the Elders and I bought meat pies for lunch, which they had never had and are now hooked on.  What I do to the Elders!!!

Rick has been revisited with a new round of a really bad cold, so he decided to cancel our Tuesday night appointments so as not to share it with the families.  However, shortly after 6 he gets a call from Sister Daka who says she has fallen and hurt her back.  We called the Elders to meet us at her home and they give her a blessing.  It is decided to take her to the hospital, since she cannot move and is in a lot of pain.  She didn’t want an ambulance, so they,(Rick, Bro. Canney, and her husband) carry her out to the car.  She wanted to crawl, but didn’t get very far.

The hospital experience here is like none I have ever seen.  Basically, you wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, not sure for what, but there is a lot of waiting involved. The night we were there it wasn’t  busy at all, there were only three people in what they call casualty but  we call the emergency room. I have been interested since we got here to know why it is called casualty and not the emergency room. Well tonight I found out. There are no emergencies  in South African hospitals but there are causalities. In fact, the man in the cubical next to Sister Daka died while we were there. That only left two people to treat so I really don’t understand the four hour wait. I found that they aren’t  very organized and I am not sure they really know what they are doing, but we took her in a little after 7 pm and didn’t get her out of there till 11pm.  The craziest part was waiting for her medication.  After the attending person released her to go home, we waited for a little over one hour for the person who finally gave her the medicines she needed to look at her chart, go across the hall, open a cabinet and pull it out, close the cabinet and hand her the meds.  There was nothing to sign, no forms to fill out and the irritating thing is he had been walking up and down the hall all night. It took him all of 1 minute to get and give her the medicine, of course, after he made us wait an hour.  Very frustrating, however that is how it is here in South Africa, Socialized medicine at its best.  I hope we never need to go to the hospital here…too scary!!